Irish Left Archive

On International Women's Day #IWD2025, here are some of the publications from feminist Irish groups in our collection.

First up, Fownes Street Journal, which was produced between 1972 and '74 by the Women's Liberation Movement.

https://www.leftarchive.ie/document/2461/

The short-lived but influential Irish Women's Liberation Movement is known for events such as the Contraception Train and an appearance on The Late Late Show that reportedly descended into a shouting match with Garret FitzGerald of Fine Gael. It was renamed Women's Liberation Movement in 1972, though members also formed other groups at that time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_Women%27s_Liberation_Movement

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Irishwomen United, founded in 1975, produced a journal called Banshee from 1975-77.

The back cover reproduced the group's charter, shown in this image. It is notable for an explicit demand for free, legal abortion and contraception (which was then available only with a prescription).

https://www.leftarchive.ie/publication/1893/

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Moving North, we have one copy of Women's Action, produced by the Belfast Women's Collective.

BWC emerged from the Socialist Women’s Group in 1977 which in turn had left the Northern Ireland Women’s Rights Movement (NIWRM).

A useful quote indicates the tensions among feminist groups in the North at that time:

Because we regarded ourselves in opposition to the British we were labelled as republican by those women’s groups who didn’t actively oppose it [the NIWRM] at the same time because we were highly critical of the Republican Movement we were labelled as a bourgeois women’s group by that section of the movement [WAI], we couldn’t win either way.

(Quoted in Loughran, C., 1986. Armagh and Feminist Strategy: Campaigns around Republican Women Prisoners in Armagh Jail. Feminist Review, (23), pp.59–79. https://doi.org/10.2307/1394720.)

https://www.leftarchive.ie/document/629/

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